Handsome Harry by James Carlos Blake

Author:James Carlos Blake
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2004-08-13T04:00:00+00:00

III

The Sprees

John said he couldn’t wait to see Billie but he sure wouldn’t mind a cold beer first. So, after switching from the stolen jobs over to Red’s and Russell’s cars, we stopped at a roadhouse speak a few miles south of Dayton.

The parking lot was jammed with vehicles and hazy with raised dust. Inside, the place was dim and smoky and crowded, raucous with laughter and loud talk and a steady blare of jukebox music. We were better dressed than most of the patrons and thought our suits might attract too much attention, but nobody paid us much notice. Three young couples at a secluded table in a corner accepted my offer to pay their tab in exchange for the table. The girls were all lookers and they knew it, and they put a lot of nice sway into their walk as they headed for the bar with their fellas. Red watched them and said what he wouldn’t give to take a little bite out of any one of those sweet rumps.

Big bite, John said.

Russell told our waitress it looked like everybody was jumping the gun on the end of Prohibition. She said Honey, where’ve you been? That poor horse is dead every which way but official.

We yakked and laughed it up over bottles of beer and bowls of roasted peanuts, everybody butting in on everybody else to get a word in, to clarify a point or ask a question or crack wise. John wanted to hear everything about the M City break and about the heist in St. Marys. He told us about the jobs he’d pulled with Copeland and some other guys—we’d already heard about them from Knuckles, but John told the stories better—and about the girls he’d been sporting with. He got a lot of chuckles when he told about being at the Chicago World’s Fair with Jenkins’s sister and getting a policeman to take snapshots of them.

I knew it, Russell said. There we were in M City, sitting on our thumbs and waiting on this Hoosier to set things up, and there he was, dicking with the chippies.

It wasn’t easy having fun while you boys were still suffering the tortures of the damned, John said, but I did the best I could.

He’d heard about Okie Jack and Jenkins. He wasn’t surprised Jack gave up so easily, what with his bad stomach, but when he heard Jenkins had been killed he got a little worried that the rest of us might have to lay so low we couldn’t risk trying to break him out of Lima.

But hell, I knew you bums wouldn’t let me down, he said, and slapped me on the shoulder.

Red said the bad news about her brother must’ve hit Jenkins’s sister pretty hard. John supposed so but couldn’t say for sure since he hadn’t seen or heard from her ever since he got arrested in her parlor. They’d been looking at some Kodaks from their Chicago trip when the landlady announced herself at

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.